Big Ant, Bare Bums, and Don Bradman

In November 2013 a small publisher working with a Melbourne, Australia-based developer released a cricket game so categorically terrible it’s gone on to be regarded by many as one of the worst games ever made. It’s subterranean Metacritic user score of just 0.7 places it below some of the very worst gaming has to offer; it’s more despised than the likes of even famously appalling shlock like Ride to Hell: Retribution, Rambo: The Video Game, and Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.

In fact, it was so unprecedentedly bad it was actually yanked from Steam a mere four days after it was released, with the publisher issuing full refunds and a public apology.

After news of the embarrassing situation hit the mainstream press Ross Symons, CEO of Melbourne’s Big Ant Studios, received calls from family members offering their support. It was, after all, quite a humiliating debacle.

But not for him.

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When [Ashes Cricket 2013] “released” on Steam and became front page news I even had family members call me to commiserate.

You see Big Ant wasn’t responsible for the infamously dreadful Ashes Cricket 2013; Big Ant was still busy putting the finishing touches on its own cricket game, Don Bradman Cricket 14. Unfortunately even Symons’ own family was getting the two confused.

“When [Ashes Cricket 2013] “released” on Steam and became front page news I even had family members call me to commiserate,” says Symons, the emphasis on the word ‘released’ his. “‘Ross, I’m so sorry, I just heard about your game.’ I knew at that point we were going to be badly affected and that we would have to wait a while after their release before ours.”

Big Ant went on to release Don Bradman Cricket 14 on PS3 and Xbox 360 in April last year, and on PC a few months later. The tweaks to the PC version in the months following the console release polished DBC14 into easily the finest and fully-featured cricket game ever made. The team recently brought the game to PS4 and Xbox One, too; it was the first Australian-made current-gen console game.

Thankfully, it wasn’t long after we had endured the very worst the genre had ever coughed up before we were able to enjoy the best.

“Big Ant was, for a long time, US work-for-hire focussed,” explains Symons. Big Ant, like many other (now-defunct) Australian studios, benefited from the fact American publishers could make a game down under for significantly less than they could at home in the US because of the weaker Australian dollar.

But that was before the global financial crisis, and the global recession that followed. Australia may have been one of the only developed countries to have actually avoided going into recession during the period but the effect on Australian developers was severe regardless. As the Australian dollar rose it became drastically more expensive to make games, and a depressing number of Australia’s largest studios were shuttered.

Big Ant was still making games for PlayStation 2 as late as mid-2009; Big Ant’s Short Track Racing: Trading Paint for PS2, built for THQ, came out the same year as games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves were wowing punters on PS3. Never heard of it? Nor had I. You can learn absolutely nothing about it here in what’s perhaps the most spectacularly pointless video ever uploaded to YouTube. It may literally be the only footage of the game on the internet.

Of course, Big Ant was never going to survive making games like Short Track Racing: Trading Paint for consoles conceived at the turn of the century. Symons explains Big Ant was lucky enough to see the writing on the wall and “make the switch to Australian games earning Australian dollars” in the wake of the GFC.

“That move certainly saved us,” he says.

The core of Big Ant’s business these days is “niche sport”, as Symons describes it. First Australian rules football and rugby league, and now cricket.

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We decided early on that we would either win big or lose big. I think it was a big win.

Generally speaking it may be a slight stretch to describe cricket, a national obsession in England and a host of other countries the English sailed a boat to over the past two centuries, as a niche sport (particularly when one of the countries it’s most popular in contains just under 18 per cent of all the humans on Earth). In video game terms, however, cricket is very much a niche player in a genre dominated by global games like football, as well popular North American sports. The marketplaces for these sports dwarf the paying audience for cricket games, largely isolated to the UK, Australia, NZ, and South Africa.

Several developers in the UK, Australia, and even Canada have tried their hands at cricket games over the past couple of decades but, while some remain cult classics, no series has hung around at the crease for long. Codemasters’ last cricket game was International Cricket 2010. EA’s last cricket game was even further back; its final delivery was Cricket 07.

Now go fetch it.

What Big Ant wanted was a different kind of cricket game, one that didn’t simply regurgitate the same gameplay tropes cricket games had been relying on since their inception. While Don Bradman Cricket 14 “leveraged some of the technology” from Big Ant’s recently-released TableTop Cricket (which was actually in development prior to DBC14), the team made a concerted effort to not borrow anything from previous cricket games. They wanted a brand-new take.

“We changed absolutely everything,” says Symons. “Not one thing was borrowed from previous cricket games so we honestly didn’t know if it was going to work until it came out and was judged by gamers.”

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We set out to own cricket gaming, totally redefine it, and make it very difficult for anyone else to compete.

“It was certainly a risky play but we decided early on that we would either win big or lose big. I think it was a big win.”

The team’s passion for cricket is obviously a driving factor for the successful execution of DBC14 but Symons also pegs it on the fact the game had no set deadline.

“This can be really dangerous of course as costs can overrun,” says Symons, “but it’s also the only way to make the game you want to make.”

“In terms of money and market, it was and is, an investment in the future of the studio; we set out to own cricket gaming, totally redefine it, and make it very difficult for anyone else to compete.”

With the officially licensed Ashes Cricket 2013 also in development at Melbourne-based Trickstar Games at the time, competition is exactly what Big Ant had braced itself for. Symons claims potential partners were even actually warned off Big Ant’s game during its development, pinning the blame on the studio’s crosstown competitor.

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The guys making Ashes 2013 tried to apply pressure via the Australian Cricket Board, commentators, personalities and manufacturers of equipment... I think some of the actions related to trying to have our game shut down fuelled a fire that people took personally.

“The guys making Ashes 2013 tried to apply pressure via the Australian Cricket Board, commentators, personalities and manufacturers of equipment,” says Symons. “Most of the matters were settled amicably; post [Ashes Cricket 2013] release we reached out to the various boards to see if we could help but did not receive a response.”

“I think some of the actions related to trying to have our game shut down fuelled a fire that people took personally, which is understandable.”

But, while the competition between the two teams may have been fierce during development, the competition on the shelves never came. Even Symons remains surprised at just how catastrophically everything went wrong for Ashes Cricket 2013.

“The crazy thing is,” begins Symons, “because my background’s tech – I wrote books in ’79 which was the first time I was published – I knew in my bones they couldn’t pull it off and it was gonna be a disaster.”

“I even tried to tease it out of them… I said if they show this game next week I’ll bare my arse on Bourke Street and run backwards. I was trying to tease this thing out of them because, apart from 95 per cent of my mind going, ‘This is going to be a disaster for them’, there was five per cent nagging doubt going, ‘There’s no way you go into a tunnel into a head-on light; they must have something up their sleeve.’

“I was waiting for a, ‘Here it really is; here’s what we’ve really been doing’ [moment]; it was one of those ones where, until it came out, I couldn’t believe it.

“I have to think, from the outside, that they had to be contractually obligated to release that thing. You had to have had a term in the contract that said, ‘If you don’t release it you’re gonna cop this penalty or that penalty’ or something. There has to be some reason why you would release that to the public. No good could come of it because if you didn’t give people their money back, I mean, it’s a deadset swindle.

“I don’t know what the intent was; bring it out, give people their money back. I don’t know who in the office there was playing it. There are so many questions, and I guess there’s only a couple of guys that can answer those questions.”

Big Ant has learned a great deal since the release of DBC14, particularly when it comes to global distribution with multiple partners across several different countries.

“It is the most important part of the business really, and the most complex,” says Symons. “We’ve learned a lot, especially with having to deal with the Indian market.”

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I would love to sell it in India for a buck because, at the moment, there’s 500+ illegal copies for one legitimate copy in India.

“The biggest problem for us is I would love to sell it in India for a buck because, at the moment, there’s 500+ illegal copies for one legitimate copy in India. We have nothing like that elsewhere. When you have an illegal copy of the game, you get rained on – I do all horrible things – we tell people that the batteries in their controller are dead and all that sort of stuff, so they go out and buy new batteries.

“Like, I get hate mail from people telling me, ‘Hey, I replaced my batteries you bastard!’ and I go, ‘Well, how about you buy a real game and you won’t have to worry about getting rained on, batteries, and broken bats and the Duckworth-Lewis that always goes against you.’

“But they actually put up with all that rather than buy an original. And I’d love to sell it to them for a buck but, if I sell it to them for a dollar, there are enough smart guys out there that will just import ’em straight into Australia, grey market. That’d kill us. That would just kill us. And that’d kill us on console; you know, ’cause these things are on Blu-ray, they’re region-free.

“I would absolutely love for those guys to get the game but they would grey market the hell out of it. I’d even love to run India at a break-even just to build a base but I can’t even afford to do it.

“If there was a way that I could just put a curtain around India, I’d give them the game. I’d put it in a box of corn flakes. I’m not making any money from India and I don’t mind them playing the game; they can’t afford it. But it would just demolish all the other markets and mean that we wouldn’t be able to make any more of them. So I still haven’t got my mind around how we do it.”

Maximum.

Big Ant has also learned a hard lesson about selling sports games abroad via DBC14’s reception in the UK. Despite Don Bradman’s significance as an icon of cricket (and his reputation as one of the most statistically dominant athletes of all time) Symons is earnest in his admission the team made a gaffe not localising the game’s identify for the UK market.

“Yeah, we made a mistake,” says Symons. “There is no doubt in my mind we made a mistake. With all due reverence to Don Bradman we made an error.”

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The box shouldn’t have been green and gold for a start. I think that’s a bit of a put off.

“There was a couple of errors there. If I put myself in the opposite position, if I put myself in a Pom’s shoes, am I going to buy an Australian cricketer? If I’m into cricket, maybe. But the box is green and gold. It’s an error. The box shouldn’t have been green and gold for a start. I think that’s a bit of a put off.”

Symons compares it to the incredibly tribal nature of the state-based rivalry in Australia’s State of Origin rugby league series, featuring the New South Wales Blues and the Queensland Maroons.

“If I was in New South Wales, am I gonna buy a maroon box for Rugby League Live?” laughs Symons. “You’re just not gonna have a maroon box in your bloody house.”

Symons has resolved to find a similar, iconic equivalent for UK releases of the series in the future.

“We have to have regionalised players,” says Symons. “We just have to.”